


scriptum, scripsi

by jamnesias



Category: Boondock Saints (Movies)
Genre: M/M, Twincest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-09-19
Updated: 2012-09-19
Packaged: 2017-11-14 15:01:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,662
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/516618
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jamnesias/pseuds/jamnesias
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He tries not to move when his brother tilts his head and starts to write, quickly, silently, on the slope of his side, even though his muscles skip-shiver at the pen at first.</p>
            </blockquote>





	scriptum, scripsi

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted at my lj under my last pen-name, _tacks_.
> 
> This was written before the travesty that was BDS2, and therefore completely disgregards it. In other words LA LA LA I CAN'T HEAR YOU

**we three**  
  
Connor feels like he’s forgetting things already. How to be anything but this. The running fast, the killing, the kneeling, the sounds of the coins sliding together in his palm like pools of shrapnel he baptises with. And the driving, endless, all night or all day; the cleaning of guns, his hands sweating in his gloves. It’s all metal and smoke and black and blood, now. Sometimes there’s no _air_.  
  
Connor’s gotten so used to seeing Murphy and himself in the balaclavas that he keeps forgetting about the bruises or marks they’ve got on their faces, that Murph hasn’t bothered to shave for a couple of weeks. At some point they had to shed everything. He isn’t sure when that was. When they shot Yakavetta? Or before. When they lost Rocco. They don’t joke anymore. Sudden men.  
  
This is no game; not a pub brawl, a bar fight, and his soul flies when he’s doing it, yes, it’s—- fucking saints, alright, aye, sudden angels, and it feels brilliant, it does, so brilliant, so shining bright to do this, to answer, to help, but then there’s. Then. It all comes round and over, again and again and again. The quiet. When it settles, and every time it…every time it comes back heavier. Soaked _and so the water slides off the feathers, leaving them able to take flight at any time -_ another snatch of motel telly, some animal documentary, Murphy flicking, Connor flinching, flashes of changed channel over Da asleep in the chair.  
  
Connor’s sick from running/firing bullets/driving towards an end he’s increasingly sure of, of Murphy even paler now they hardly get any sun at all, of Da having been in jail for over twenty years and always _always_ straight backed and set shouldered, even lying down.  


* * *

  
 **and you will see**  
  
Before they leave on the hit (this one, another one), Murphy leans out of the motel window with his elbows on the sill, eyes closed, finishing his cigarette properly before getting his gloves. His guns are on, he can hear Connor fastening his own, Da in the bathroom. All he’ll need is to get his coat when they go.  
  
But then there’s a hand flat on the curve of his spine, and Murphy leans back, opening his eyes, to see Connor reflected in the pane. He’s touching near where a bullet grazed Murphy the day before; still painful line of hot hot sting whipping down his back as they all ducked at the crack of shots that had Connor pulling him back through the doorway as Da shot the fucker, yelling, that had Connor yanking his balaclava and Murphy’s top up and tracing the blood running the way the bullet had gone, that had Connor pressing his face to Murphy’s hair for a second and breathing in when he was washing the wound for him, later.  
  
Connor’s got no gloves on yet either, his hair still darkwet from his shower (cold, and quick, which is unfair because Murphy knew his thigh still ached sometimes in the morning if they’d been running – fleeing - the night before). Their gazes meet in the glass, Connor going to say something, and Da comes out from from the bathroom – flicking his dead cigar out of the window between them without even needing to look, sliding his gun into his waistband, striding out of the room to go and get the car – and Connor doesn’t.  
  
He glances out of the window, instead. Scuffed soil and scraggly shrub growing below the sill, the _grand_ view of the car park. In the cool morning his palm is only a little warm through Murphy’s top, but it’s nice, and Murphy misses it when he moves it suddenly. Except that’s when they hear the firedoor banging open (no alarms, the signs were bullshit), and Connor looks around and reaches over, grabs the pen attached by a chain to the desk. He pulls until the chain snaps, and uncaps the pen with his teeth as he turns back.  
  
Murphy tries not to move when Connor lifts his top (he’d been cord tight, holding his breath, the time before), looking at his back. He tries not to move when his brother tilts his head and starts to write, quickly, silently, on the slope of his side, even though his muscles skip-shiver at the pen at first. He tries not to move but he does turn so that he’s looking at Connor properly, not his reflection; Connor’s hair smelling clean and shadow just as dark as it underneath his eyes. He pulls the fabric higher, fist resting against Murphy’s ribs, easy writing until an engine starts outside. Da revs a little to get their attention, and Connor swears, spits the cap out of the window, pulls Murphy sideways with him as he scribbles the last bit out of view in the corner. He writes fast, hand slanting sideways, pen flicking off at the end, then lets go and steps away.  
  
Murphy stares after him as he throws the pen back onto the desk, grabs his gloves and coat from the chair in the corner, chucks Murphy his. Da revs again and Murphy starts, finally - he throws his cigarette the way the cap went and nods to Da as he yanks the window down. _Alright, we’re comin’._  
  
Bundling his coat under his arm, he stops halfway across the room to yank the hem of his top up, trying to quickly read what’s written, but it’s too far back and down. His fucking _shoulder’s_ in the way. Then the door to the room slams after Connor, and he glances up and realises Connor slammed it on purpose, because Murphy sees himself rippling-rattling in the dull mirror on the back of it. He just has time to wonder how the fuck Connor comes up with some of this stuff, before hurrying, twisting his body to look.  
  
A few lines of black scrawl next to the end of the red wound, and when he sucks in a breath, it breathes in too.  
  
 _be careful. shut up just please be careful, please, be careful, be careful please please please_ bumping over the last of his ribs.  
  
Connor wrote it backwards, so that in the mirror it would be the right way.  
  
Murphy avoids eye contact with himself as he covers it up again. Nicks the pen on his way out too, writes the words on his palm as they are on his body only with the letters right (only, wrong) as he kicks the firedoor open for himself. Tugs his gloves on just before he gets into the car.  
  
 _esaelp esaelp esaelp luferac eb, luferac eb, esaelp, luferac eb esaelp tsuj pu tuhs. luferac eb esaelp._  
  
It sounds like prayer.  


* * *

  
  
 **look behind you**  
  
Murphy starts off with single words, half sentences. Blue biro, black.  
  
Four hits and the chunk of flesh taken with the bullet that smashed through Connor’s shoulder (and bled and bled and bled hot dark overflow stickslippery on the floor) later, Murphy, curled around him in the (this one, another one) single bed, Da snoring in the other, whispers "Move your. Connor, can ya move your arm up here?", and writes a tiny sort of paragraph in an ink pen from off the bedside table as close to the wound as he can go without causing pain, so that the bandage will cover it from Da, so that it might sink into the new skin and stay, so that neither of them have to say _I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry you always feel you have to protect me you don’t thankyou please don’t fucking do it again_ aloud because they’ve never been good at that (because it applies to both really, though it’s only actually on Connor’s body).  
  
Quickly, it becomes easier to write than speak. Quickly it makes sense. No asking, no warning that they’re going to, it turns to just turning, leaning before they leave, or sometimes when they get back, or sometimes and then, yes, at any time. Like it’s normal, but it’s not as if they are, and this just. Is.  
  
It’s a way to speak to each other, just each other, that they really fucking _need_. Even the few times they’re alone, now, they don’t talk out loud much. Silence bleeds in through the cracks of shite motel rooms like smoke, condenses, hangs, slips into every car they steal and dump (with money in the glove compartment), fills nothing in the gaps between their prayers. They can’t go to Confession. The last church they went to, picked because it was so remote, wouldn’t even let them in. The Priest in the one _before_ had welcomed them with open palms.  
  
But what to say, anyway. What to say that everyone doesn’t already know. _I shoot evil fuckers. Sometimes they gurgle up curses as they go, sometimes they clutch at my arm; grip, scrabble, scrabble, jumbled letters in a dribble of sorrow._ What else to say is different, completely different, and written because what he might say ( _Connor._ Aye? _It’s…still the same, right?_ It is. It’s alright. _We are right._ Murph, you know we are. _Aye, Jesus. Right. …And wrong._ Yeah. Yeah. That too.) has too much meaning for his voice. Connor has the thicker brogue, but even he…he couldn’t.  
  
A waitress’s pen from a diner writing just above the inside of Connor’s elbow _D’you think Da really believes we had the dream?_ , a half finished fountain pen from the counter in a garage store when that one gets lost. Streaming black flowing and scratching delicately along the rise of Murphy’s collarbone, like a tattoo only this doesn’t hurt at all, this _i don’t think it matters to him either way_ washes off, this _i don’t think he **needs** to_ he misses.  
  
Curling sentences around the bump of Connor’s ankle and the arch of his foot. He’s ticklish. He jerks away, and Murphy would laugh, but. _I don’t love him yet_. He holds Connor’s calf tighter. _Do you?_  
  
Da’s a fucking _presence_. A marked holy man. Our Father. He’s with them but he’s trying to guide; he’s a weight, inside, around. It’s…nice, having him, and Murphy’s found a way to respect him, and he’ll fight with him and for him, for Him, but he can’t…he just can’t be the same with Connor around him.  
  
But they aren’t the same anymore, anyway. They aren’t exactly like they were even though this was what they wanted, and they aren’t exactly like each other but then that was never— that was never a problem anyway, not until Murphy started worrying he might be losing himself to this, and wanting to touch Connor to remember.  
  
There’s not a mark to see on Murphy’s back anymore (except the ones that should be there, that birthmark, his tattoo). They took a week to let Connor’s shoulder heal a bit, that was three weeks back, now it’s a long pinkwhite scar on what was slightly tanned skin. They’re looking more like each other. Tips of Connor’s hair not lightened by the sun anymore, Murphy sitting quieter and eyeing things harder, Connor bouncing a knee every now and then as they both smoke, silent, shared.  
  
They never say anything, but they never really did, except that Connor wants to now. He’s taken up biting his lip, like Murphy, whose mouth is dry from swallowing things to hold them in.  
  


* * *

  
  
 **but if you do, you will**  
  
Murph brings out a splintered green biro. It’s all he could find, alright, pimps aren’t exactly all that bothered with _pens_. Still Connor raises his eyebrows at it, and Murphy shoves him sideways. “Fuck you.”  
  
Later he writes _I feel like I miss you, sometimes_ in Russian, where Connor once let handcuffs rip into his skin. Means he can’t push his sleeves up for two days, because someone might see, and that drives him crazy. He looks at Murphy like he might have chosen there partly just to aggravate him, and he didn’t, but he hasn’t seen that kind of expression for ages and when he grins back it feels better, real, for a bit, it feels good.  
  
Connor’s writing has stayed simple. Blunt, you’d say, if you didn’t know him. Sometimes slow, sometimes quick. Once in pencil that smudged under his fingertips because he’s finding it harder to let go. Murphy always did and does write anything, whole paragraphs, in scratchy script. Never seems to think about it beforehand (and before concentration and before his frown and free fingers rubbing along his lip), just writes. He presses full stops so hard the pen tip leaves a tiny swell. A redblue mark. A star.  
  
Late November, he sits on the toilet lid, leaning carefully forward with his fingers gripping around the back of Connor’s thigh, writing just below the edge of his boxers while Connor smoothes tape to the bandage whitetight around his bruised (cracked?) ribs. Murph’s are done already, Da shrugged off the offer and limped to get ice from the room’s fridge instead. They’d had to get out of the crackhouse like they were on fire, since _it_ was. Stop drop and fucking roll, aye, only replace ‘stop’ with ‘leap off the third storey’ and ‘drop and roll’ with ‘slam onto a dumpster so hard you dent the metal and your rosary beads get half embedded in your skin’.  
  
He’d wanted to jump with Connor, but Connor was half dragging Da, looking for another way out, so Murphy had gone first to make them follow.  
  
He puts his letters bumping together over the messy scar. Connor can’t really feel it; the nerves sizzled back and burnt away under the iron, but Murphy’s fingers are warm. _Sometimes you’re too much Connor, Connor. You have to know when to fucking run._ It’s his job to tell Connor this. Always has been, still is now, even if it’s not aloud. _You can’t do this. You can’t take anything for anyone, because I still can’t take watching you bleed._  
  
Connor’s washing his face now, and sloshing water over the back of his neck, rubbing the muscles. Leg braced out for Murphy, who’s looking at it in the steamed up shower door. He watches the drops run over Connor’s skin, shine but the water dirty, steam dripping down the mirror and the window, and finds he’s _speaking_.  
  
“You’re always fuckin' bleeding, now.”  
  
Connor lifts his head and looks at him in the glass. Red eyed, like _red red blood_ he writes. “Murph…” Connor says, but Murphy is pushing the hem of Connor's boxers up a little further, to keep writing, _red river_ and not really looking as he does. _red rum_  
  
Connor glances down, and looks sharply back up at that. “Funny.”  
  
Murphy’s out of words. He swallows, and uses Connor and the edge of the sink to help pull himself up. Throws the pen into the dirty water in the bowl and doesn’t stay to watch the ink spill out.  
  
Later, when he comes round again after getting knocked out with…fuck, a chair, a pistol butt, the wall, one of those, fighting the two bastards who’d got out of the warehouse and fucking _tracked them back_ \- (and oh Christ they’d thought they’d got them all and it had been like a morning way way back only flipped, when his stomach had turned to ice and cracked and shattered at coming back from a smoke with Da outside and pushing the door quietly ‘cause Connor was sleeping, to see them there, standing, each with a pistol to the back of Connor's head just waiting, waiting still singed and bloody, waiting to show him as they did it) - he finds himself in the back seat of the car.  
  
Da’s driving. He's humming something under his breath, in the glow of the dashboard lights because it’s night time suddenly, Murphy’s head’s cradled in Connor’s lap, Connor’s palm warm on his forehead, and  
  
 _stole a tenner from your jeans when we were 14. I was pissed at you for something. bought a pack of cigs and then you went and fucking smoked the lot, and the thing that annoyed me most was that when I found you smirking round the last one all I wanted to do was laugh. you always fucking do it, you always make me love you when I shouldn’t, you make me love you when I don’t want to, Murphy, and I fucking, I love you, I fucking do_  
  
is fresh and secretly done right there in the car, and _tiny_ , on his stomach where his t-shirt rode up.  
  
The same day, while Da’s showering in this new room that looks like every other one except they’re in Chicago, now, Connor gets the pen again. On the backs of Murphy’s shoulders before he pulls his t-shirt on. _~~I think~~ ~~you~~ for thee, my Lord, for thee, that’s what you are. And I wonder what’s for me, Mur_  
  
Murphy flinches away. “Fuck, enough, Connor.”  
  
Connor makes a _noise_ , like nothing he’s heard from him - _wounded_ , fast. Taking his wrist and tugging him round and immediately writing on his palm, pen digging in, jaw set so tight Murphy can see the muscle strained. His eyes are different. In the edges water ripples, blue. _i want to know what do we get to keep? As shepherds_ over to the right palm _but aren’t you mine as well?_  
  
Murphy reads it, as he writes, and curls his fingers up around the question mark. Around the question. Connor, looking at him, watching, swallows hard harsh breath out through his nose like a curse and turns away and Murph snaps that closed hand out, gets _Connor’s_ wrist and pulls him back. Meets him, fists his other hand in Connor’s hair to hold him there when Connor grabs the front of his shirt and kisses him. He does it with a low moan – and they are snapping together, breaking, crashing in the middle and leaning on each other for a second, holding each other up, unbalanced. Cracked lips, warm wet gasp of breath and tongue. All heat and quick; snatched, like a snarl. Both press hard. One of Connor’s canine teeth bites into his lip and leaves a tiny swell. A redblue mark. A star.  
  
He washes his hands three times afterwards. To get the pen off. Washes his hands, oh. Washes his hands, God. Washes his hands.  
  
They spend this first day just looking around. New city, new evil to be sought, new places to try and look casual, try to find a good pub anywhere, try not to brush each other as they’re walking because they failed before when they went through the doorway.  
  
Da opts to stay in the halfway decent one they find, even after the two pints they said would be all. Settles back onto his bar stool with a sigh through smoke. They don’t look at each other on the way back to the motel. Don’t talk. Just Don’t, at all, with anything. Don't. They’re in another week by the time Connor sits down on the edge of Murphy’s bed, just as he's waking up, face buried in the pillow.  
  
Connor sits with his back to him, silent. Can't— this is not being able to talk to him properly anymore. This is wrong, this is right. This is so fucked up. He pulls a pen from the bedside drawer and turns and leans over. Presses his fingers to the skin he’s going for; backs of Murphy’s knees, his thighs. (Also low, low, low on his spine, only there's no excuse for that.)  
  
Murphy squirms at it. Thighs tremble-tensing, shivers running up his back that Connor can see, arching up a bit and trying not to, clutching at the sheets though he doesn’t make a sound. Connor watches, wets his lip, leans over and writes _do that again_. He does. Connor closes his eyes and rubs his hand over his face, drags it back through his hair. Opens them again, and writes over the top of it _I’m going to die first, Murph. That’s all I know. And I think it’s right. I think I should._  
  
Murphy doesn’t actually find out what it says until the morning, because Da comes back early. Strides in silent, calm, but hurried, flicks his eyes over to them briefly, already going for the key. He got recognised. They have to go. They sleep in the car, on the road, Connor’s cheek turned to the window. Murphy gets out for a piss in the middle of fuck knows where and holds a bit before he goes back, rolls his jeans up to look.  
  
He writes _fuck you fuck you fuck you you selfish fucking bastard_ on the back of Connor’s neck while he’s sat in the driver’s seat, through the gap under the headrest, as they wait for Da to come back from his own piss break. There’s a new state line to cross. They’ll just have to keep going afterwards, they can’t stop anywhere for a while.  
  
Connor doesn’t need to read it. He looks at Murph in the rear view mirror, took his shades off for it, Murphy’s hand shaking as he writes and trying to watch that, force it to work and not glance up throat rough and then he’s done and his lip trembles and he snarls at it and climbs through into the passenger seat, yanks his own shades off, pen and plastic in his grip, glares at Connor. Stares. And when he opens his mouth nothing comes out, except (a deep breath in before) “If you leave me with this I’ll kill you.”  
  
 _And fuck you saying that doesn’t make sense. It does. Think about it differently._  
  
Think about it backwards.  
  
Connor pauses (a deep breath in). Then he nods.  
  
Da gets in the back, in the middle, and spreads his arms out along the top of the seats


End file.
